Plague vs Plague vs Plague

Last Thursday I played a game of Deadzone, and I try to write this up quickly before I forget most that happened. I played a game of Warmachine right after, and on weekend I'm going to play to a Warmachine tournament.

We played a normal 70 point strike team game. Well, normal when it came to team construction. We also had diseased Stage 3Z zombies wandering around, and, well... their impact on the game was a lot bigger than I would have ever guessed.

Anyway.

My list was:

1x Stage 3A Ethereal General
1x Muton Commander Simmonds (MC Simmonds?)
2x Stage 3A Muton troopers
1x Silacoid Hound
1x Muton with Heavy Plasma HMG
1x Sectopod Strider

Mission: Careful Carnage (survive and kill)

Opponent was also playing the Plague faction, so we had three different Plague "factions" on board, then.

1x Stage 3A General
2x Stage 2A
1x Stage 3A Trooper
2x Plague Hounds
1x Plague Strider

Mission: Stack 'em High (kill troopers and 11+ cost models)

I took a picture from the sector before either player had deployed. Any models seen there are Stage 3Z zombies.

First real picture with action is from the very end of round 1, and it's badly aligned, as most of my own troops aren't showing up. Also a ton of things happened during the first round, I guess I should have taken some pictures in-between.

Anyway. Those zombies had a tremendous impact on the game, as my alien plague is not past cube row two, and the original plague on the opposing side is struggling at cube row three.

Alarming thing here was that my Sectopod Strider had already suffered three wounds from the fight with zombies! And I guess it might have died altogether, because it's size 4 unit, so silacoid hound shouldn't have been able to get into the same cube to help around.

Since both of us were playing Plague faction, the zombies lead to a funny situation. Both most certainly had some sort of kill mission, but the zombies were in-between us, and they soon proved to be very capable of killing things and not just blocking way. It was some sort of twisted version of a survival game, as both players scored points from zombie kills. I guess it might have been a viable tactic for me to just hide in some building, send a dog and/or a trooper to lure away the zombies, survive over 50% and score points with that, and wait for zombies to kill enough models from the opponent.

Well, turn 2 started with a Blast Away! action at the cube where sectopod strider was standing. This cleared all but one zombie, and I sighed for relief. Strider easily beat up the last zombie, tripled the attack rolls and moved to cube right on the left.

That was my downfall, I guess. Command action moved the enemy Strider one cube, then it Sprint two cubes, and Move card was used - suddenly the uninjured Strider was in melee with my almost broken 28 point model. Cruddy rolls didn't help here - Sectopod was smashed into bits, and the culprit got a free move to the square with HMG and Simmonds. Amazing rolls helped here, though - Simmonds got a free escape from the fight.

Here I changed my plans. Now I would just hide and do nothing else, and hope that zombies would kill The Other Plague.

Silacoid Hound, however, ruined it all. Muton Commander Simmonds, Ethereal General and a rank-and-file trooper were hiding in the green building at left, HMG was in relative safety of melee with the enemy Strider (I spent all remaining Command Points I had to keep it distracted.)

But then the doge ran, but not far enough. Enemy Stage 2A, aided either with Move card or succesfull command action, killed the molten rock puppy, tripling or doubling the result, and taking a free move to attack the hiding aliens. The aliens were not happy that their secret hideout had been found, and instantly killed the Stage 2A as it entered. But this didn't really matter - thanks to the loss of Silacoid Hound, I had fallen below 50% points, so I wouldn't gain any more points from Survive victory condition. Aliens had scored two.

After counting that even if every single other enemy model died, I would still get only up to nine victory points. After the game I realised that I could have won by gathering Intel. And killing everything. If I remember right, the zombies killed a plague hound and a trooper from enemy plague, and injured the second dog.

It might have been interesting to play the game to the very end, but I decided to concede here, because within 30 minutes I would need to begin another game.

Anyway. What do I think of the zombies? I don't know. It's a nice game mode that really shakes things up, but I feel that playing too many games with uninvited guests would quickly get too tiresome and unwieldy.